Prime Minister Pravind Jugnauth was an angry man in parliament. He blamed the opposition’s ‘hysteria’ for forcing his hand in scrapping the government’s scheme to sell Mauritian passports for a million dollars a pop that was unveiled in the 2018 budget. The manner in which Jugnauth put it, this was a missed opportunity to introduce some ‘transparency’ in allocation of citizenship: you pay, you stay. Unlike, he said, the current system that allows for the prime minister to exercise some discretion in who to turn into a Mauritian. 

Now of course there is a problem with this notion of how ‘transparent’ all of this was going to be to begin with. When introducing the scheme, nowhere was it mentioned that selling off passports in this way would be accompanied by the taking away of the government’s discretionary powers in allocating citizenship, or that the passport scheme was meant to replace it. So the idea that selling passports was a step forward in ‘transparency’ was a bit of a stretch. Also not mentioned was how the scheme was supposed to be managed by the Economic Development Board (EDB) – dominated by private sector representatives. The same EDB, mind you, that saw fit to allow a convicted South African drug dealer, Glen Agliotti, to come to these shores. Or how the passport sales were to be conducted by Henley and Partners, a company that admitted that the bulk of its clientele were oligarchs from the Middle East, the former Soviet bloc and East Asia. The government’s notion that British people were lining up to buy Mauritian passports was too ludicrous to take seriously. Nor indeed how Henley and Partners were working with the infamous Cambridge Analytica, a company specialised in harvesting internet data to help sway elections in a number of countries. Henley would bring in Cambridge Analytica to bring in governments that would then reward them with passport sale contracts. This is the ‘transparent’ system that the government is regretting that it was not allowed to bring into Mauritius. 

Just how deep this love of getting rid of discretionary power at the hands of the prime minister runs can be gleaned from the fact that while this passport scheme was stuck in limbo, the government introduced amendments to the Immigration Act giving the prime minister even more discretionary powers in giving out residence permits. When it came to passports, the government wanted to be ‘transparent’ but when it came to residence permits, it wanted more discretionary power. 

The problem is that we need more transparency in the manner in which this entire system of granting passports and residence permits is run. As the economy is now devolving into one dependent upon land sales to the global elite (luxury real estate at inflated prices is now the largest chunk of investment coming in) the problems with opacity are now being felt. The Drugs Commission Report sounded the warning of South African drug money buying up IRS properties and getting residence permits. But just how dependent this sector has become on funny money can be seen in a case of Alvaro Sobrinho, who, in his brief stint in Mauritius, managed to corrupt certain politicians, bureaucrats and nearly caused a constitutional crisis at the pinnacle of the state between the state and Government House. When Sobrinho finally packed up, not coincidentally, an entire IRS project in the north went bankrupt. The warning bells are ringing loud and clear. 

We do need more transparency in the way that decisions are made regarding who can stay in the country and who gets a passport, unless the country is to be reduced to a mere bolt hole for the crooked and corrupt rich from elsewhere. But the government’s plan to sell passports – in addition to the opacity that’s already there – to that same market, was a bullet that Mauritius was wise to dodge.